February 5, 2010

Diabadass:

Here is another guest post from my teens. This time Kelley wrote some 'tude with her T1 brother Connor.In the light of a recent TV program that added to the T1, T2, you caused this confusion that our good friend Kerri wrote brilliantly about at SixUntilMe some attitude is appropriate.

The ‘Betes has infiltrated our lives. However long the forced cohabitation with The ‘Betes has been for you - years, months, days, hours - it’s been too long. The ‘Betes is too many things: too long, too much, too hard, too confusing, too high, too low, too, too, too. To manage all of this we deal with meters, needles and pricks every day.

But times are a’changing. I mean, we still have to put up with needles and pricks but at least now I can pick the color of my meter!

Among all the baggage The ‘Betes carries with it as it elbows its way into our lives is a word. A horrible word. A label. But before I get into that let’s talk about labels for a second. What is a label? Well, according to dictionary.com (C’mon, you weren’t expecting me to go find an actual book were you?) a label is “a short word or phrase descriptive of a person, group, intellectual movement.”

Got that? A short word or phrase descriptive of a person or group.

The ‘Betes carries with it this label: “diabetic.” There is no worse word in the world. Why? Because of all the confusion, misconceptions and misunderstandings that come along with it. To the world at large it communicates things like “lazy,” “unhealthy,” “fat,” “sugar-free,” and, worst of all, “old.”

It doesn’t describe us with The ‘Betes or our lives. It doesn’t rely to the general public our relationship with The ‘Betes - our trials, triumphs, or, most importantly, our youth. So, I propose a new label, one that communicates it all: “diabadass.” If we could convince the people around us to replace the horribly offensive “diabetic” with the more appropriate “diabadass” we could all live a little easier.

IF nobody warned you keep an eye out for lows these first few weeks. Some folks have a little resistance to injected insulin at first. As a result they need a tad more. Then their body get used to the stuff and presto they go low cause that tad more is well more than they need.

If you haven't found it yet look up TiDiabetes.com. Good place for you to meet some others working with T1.